Wednesday, July 16, 2014

CCP: Its Almost Too Late

You ever wonder why you don't hear stories about scrappy groups from NPC 0.0 trying to take sov space and getting smacked down by the blocs who attempt to defend their territory? In theory this should happen all the time. In practice, it almost never does.

There's a 'You must be this high to ride' bar in front of sov null. Unless you are a bloc or are backed explicitly or implicitly by a bloc you're not going to get to get a slice of sov - and supercapitals are entirely to blame.

Whoever has the biggest supercapital group near a quadrant can ensure that an organization trying to gain entrance into sov null or build up any real capital fleet in NPC 0.0 gets utterly splattered. You want to try to build up a capital group in lowsec? Good luck deploying against a tower without someone in a bloc finding out and dropping a pile of bored supercarrier pilots on you. You want to build up or buy enough supers that you can take down sov structures without seriously questioning your life choices? You need to have more than a bloc can destroy to prevent them dropping on you - which means you essentially must be a bloc already.

I agree with everything written in there because I've been saying the same things here for nearly four fucking years (post Capitals Online, Oct 2010):

4) There is no effective counter-measure to supercaps other than other supercaps. While it is possible to destroy a Titan or supercarrier with only sub-cap ships, you need effectively a perfect storm of conditions to do so: a tackled ship, a few hundred of your allies, hope your opponent does have a hundred or so of their sub-cap ships, and enough DPS to kill the ship in 15 minutes if he logs off. On the other hand, a small handful of supercaps can hotdrop a tackled titan and kill it in a few minutes.But beyond that, a fleet of enemy supercaps can't be stopped by anything outside of a fleet of your own supercaps. Or a hell of a lot of regular capitals or metric shitton of well coordinated sub-caps, neither option which is very feasible for your average every day operation. Thus "supercap blobs" are well nigh un-counterable, and POS defenses are inadequate to deter these fleets.Fundamentally, you need supercaps to deal with enemy supercaps.

The stagnation in null sec is killing the game CCP, and its really starting to show. You're running out of time.

4 comments:

Getting into Sov space isn't the only goal people have. Highsec is better for ISK than Sov-null and those "crappy alliances" kill more Sov holders than they kill each other. Did you know that both Mordus Angles and Pasta syndicate killed more CFC than Pandemic Legion or NC. or Nulli last month?

Also, there is a level between supers and subcaps: capitals. Drop a dozen insured, T2 fit dreads on a tackled super and it's dead before they could do anything. Even if you lose all the dreads, you lost half as much ISK.

I find it rather humorous that those responsible for the supercap proliferation are now the ones decrying it. I think to a certain extent it is already too late because, as The Mittani pointed out, it has been years since anyone new has "broken" into sov null-sec, and most of the new players have known nothing other than the few coalitions that now dominate all of sov.

I'll make a counter point to Gevlon, because like Kirith I have been complaining and protesting the proliferation of supercapitals for years as well. The problem with your viewpoint is that you think kills directly equals sov. Maybe you logically understand that it is more complex than that, but you emotionally think it is that simple. Kills have nothing to do with sov, it has everything to do with movement of ships capable of destroying sov structures. The CFC, NC., and Pandemic Legion have thousands of supercapital ships and have fielded hundreds at a time. By your own math, that would mean that you would need to field THOUSANDS of capital ships just to balance the conflict. Most alliances, and certainly none that aren't current sov holders, simply do not have the physical bodies to do such a thing.

Supercapitals are the Battleships of EVE. IRL, it was common wisdom that it would take a Battleship to kill another Battleship. That was partially true until someone noticed that those massive steel machines had thin decks, and a number enough of airplanes could just drop bombs through their decks and kill them from inside with such ease that eventually Battleships died as a class.

There are a few tricks that could rebalance the situation without driving everyone nuts, but, maybe they would not be enough.

Let's say that a supercap has a weapon that can one-shot another supercap, but the weapon haves a high chance to malfunction and miss. Let's say that each time a supercap is shot at and survives, that increases its chances to hit with its own one-shotter. So in a assymetric fight, the side with more supercap haves a higher chance to score "first hit deaths", but also the side with less supercaps sees its own chances improve with each missed shot from the enemy.

Someone should set up and run a simulation of that to test whether it makes sense...

Lol gelvon thinks he knows what he's talking about thats cute......my solution has always been to allow super production in sov null and low. At least then the big boys have to play whack a mole to hold the others down. Instead of just letting mechanics do it for them

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